Why do the Russian people believe what they must know to be lies? They can't deal emotionally with the reality, and they are aggressively offered a more comforting lie that happens also to keep them out of trouble with authorities if they go along with it. It's a very old cultural trait, predating even the Soviet Union.
@wesdym I associate Russians with wry, distrustful utterances like "The people are the shit the wealthy grow their money in". Yes, the "everyone's got a fiddle going, and you're a fool if you don't" is known to the working class everywhere. I'm still bewildered by this weird fealty to the aims of a class -- and a person -- who quite manifestly does not have their best interests at heart, to say the least.
@wesdym (But then I'm equally puzzled about US Republicans and evangelicals, for exactly the same reasons.)
@pieist For leaders, the goal is power for its own sake. It's no deeper or more complex than that. For followers, it's just ignorance, stupidity, or bigotry.
@pieist A contemporary Tajik scholar, Kamil Galeev, writes extensively about the historical and modern background of the politics and problems of the present-day RF. He's unfortunately only on Hellsite still (Someone should talk to him about that), but he's got some useful insights about all this, much more and better than I could ever offer. You can find his (often very long) threads here:
@pieist My sense is that to the average resident of what we call the RF (and various Russian possessions through history), the whole system seems impossible to resist, and so it's better to go along to get along. The concept of 'vranyo' (artful, shared mistruth for common purpose) is endemic. And everyone fears if they're NOT working some scheme, they're behind other people -- and too often, they're probably right.
The cycle of endemic corruption must somehow be broken.